At Melville Intermediate School students in Room Eight follow a digital learning cycle with their work.
This is a variation on a digital learning cycle that I first used with students from Tamaki Intermediate in Auckland in 2008 which was developed with Dorothy Burt from Point England School. I would consider it a cornerstone of all our digital online work.
The digital learning cycle is the plan that we follow when we are looking at planning some online work. Our students follow the process when they create a piece of work. This document is in essence the cornerstone of any online work that we create in class and all work should ideally be traced back to this document. Our class page Melvilleroom8.blogspot.com started in its current incarnation in February 2009. Since then we've had over 23,000 visitors from 104 countries. In addition to the core visitors to the site we've also posted material from our class page on a variety of other sites: Youtube, Teachertube, Vimeo. My previous classroom page, Tamakitoday has had 12,000 visitors since March 2008 (it is currently inactive).
Melville Intermediate 2009-10
Our School is a decile four school located in suburban Hamilton in the Waikato region. The single largest ethnic group at our school is Maori. As a result of which we've focussed some of our learning activities and our ICT interactions with other classrooms and students on things Maori. At Melville Intermediate students at the start of each school year for assessment for their portfolio have to produce and recite a Maori Mihi. We were able to take this example and publish it online through our class page. Throughout the year we have been following the progress of our tutorials through google. Google ranks search hits on the basis of popularity, so the more something is view the higher up the ranking it appears. Maori Mihi/Mihi Template or Mihi Examples or other variations of such have provided our class page with a considerable stream of traffic throughout the year. In the end of September we were currently tracking as the number one search result for Google. Its something that we share regularly with the students. We've covered procedural writing in class during term two, as a result of that we developed video tutorials on how to use Raukau Sticks. This video was used as a tutorial by a class in Califorina, who used it as a basis for the class lesson on Raukau. In a similar vein they created a video lesson on how to speak Spanish and we responded to it by creating our own video. We also created videos creating Poi Making, How to Count in Maori and Maori Haka. Empowering the students through their culture and being successful with it has been an integral part of the classroom this year. We've skyped with classrooms in New Zealand and internationally to assist them with their studying of Maori culture.
Tamaki Intermediate 2008
In the past at my decile 1a school produced Learn to Speak Samoan Videos, Learn to Speak Tongan, how to preform a Sasa in a similar vein. It was important to celebrate the success of the students and focus on their cultural and interests. This lead to a focus on culture and also sport. One of the points of difference that we created, that greatly added collaboration was our Girls Rugby videos. It created a regular audience for our work and allowed us to interact with other classrooms once they'd viewed it.
At St Clair writing has been a target area , aiming to achieve consistency in school wide practice and a rise in achievement. E-learning and online collaboration has lead to increased motivation, quality feedback from a "real audience" and a sense of purpose for writing. The Writing Cycle is an integral part of our literacy programme layered with literacy cycles as appropriate...
Melville Intermediate 2009-10
Our School is a decile four school located in suburban Hamilton in the Waikato region. The single largest ethnic group at our school is Maori. As a result of which we've focussed some of our learning activities and our ICT interactions with other classrooms and students on things Maori. At Melville Intermediate students at the start of each school year for assessment for their portfolio have to produce and recite a Maori Mihi. We were able to take this example and publish it online through our class page. Throughout the year we have been following the progress of our tutorials through google. Google ranks search hits on the basis of popularity, so the more something is view the higher up the ranking it appears. Maori Mihi/Mihi Template or Mihi Examples or other variations of such have provided our class page with a considerable stream of traffic throughout the year. In the end of September we were currently tracking as the number one search result for Google. Its something that we share regularly with the students. We've covered procedural writing in class during term two, as a result of that we developed video tutorials on how to use Raukau Sticks. This video was used as a tutorial by a class in Califorina, who used it as a basis for the class lesson on Raukau. In a similar vein they created a video lesson on how to speak Spanish and we responded to it by creating our own video. We also created videos creating Poi Making, How to Count in Maori and Maori Haka. Empowering the students through their culture and being successful with it has been an integral part of the classroom this year. We've skyped with classrooms in New Zealand and internationally to assist them with their studying of Maori culture.Tamaki Intermediate 2008
In the past at my decile 1a school produced Learn to Speak Samoan Videos, Learn to Speak Tongan, how to preform a Sasa in a similar vein. It was important to celebrate the success of the students and focus on their cultural and interests. This lead to a focus on culture and also sport. One of the points of difference that we created, that greatly added collaboration was our Girls Rugby videos. It created a regular audience for our work and allowed us to interact with other classrooms once they'd viewed it.At St Clair writing has been a target area , aiming to achieve consistency in school wide practice and a rise in achievement. E-learning and online collaboration has lead to increased motivation, quality feedback from a "real audience" and a sense of purpose for writing. The Writing Cycle is an integral part of our literacy programme layered with literacy cycles as appropriate...